Tenancy horror stories from London and around the world

Tenancy horror stories from London and around the world

The relationships between landlords and tenants are rarely great and in some cases they are simply disastrous. From invasion of personal privacy, just because they own the property where you live, to borderline law breaking, landlords could be really unpleasant and last year, people from all over London decided to tell their horror stories involving their tenants and the properties they own.

According to this article on the Telegraph 60 percent of the people living in London by 2025 will be renting. This means that only 40% of the people would own a house or an apartment of their own, but that’s another story entirely.

Last year in 2015 Twitter became the place where angry tenants vented out their frustration with previous tenants and here’s a roundup of some of the people that used the hashtag #ventYourRent. There’s even a specially dedicated website on Tumblr where people from around the world tell us stories on the negligence of the property owners.

Here’s a quick roundup of the latest and most shocking stories we found from London below

This girl for example has mould all over her bathroom, but the landlord doesn’t really seem to care about it. As you might expect, it’s the problem of the tenant, as they’re the one breathing the toxic mould and exposing their lungs to the problem.

This girl living in Hackney pays almost a thousand pounds for a studio apartment, which doesn’t even have any furniture prior to her move and didn’t have furniture for a month after. The lack of heating in the winter time is simply unimaginable. The problem is that there aren’t any laws that will protect the tenant in such situation, or make the landlord cut some of the rent for the time in which there wasn’t any heating there.

Harringay isn’t exactly the most expensive part of London. This couple has decided to save money by eating pasta everyday to be able to pay their rent. At nearly 1300 quid, this rent is simply astonishing. We don’t have much more details about the condition of the property and it could be a case of picking an apartment which is out of your budget, but it could be a case in which the rent was increased throughout time and the tenants simply like living where they have lived for the past years.

Increasing the rent is something common in the UK and especially London. After all it’s a game of supply and demand. The landlords have something that is in high demand and people are willing to pay more for it. Increasing the rent when there’s water dripping and rats in the apartment and there’s nothing done to fix those problems is simply hypocritical. If this woman didn’t live in the UK, but Germany instead, the law would have been on her side, preventing the landlord from increasing the rent. The system in Germany is definitely in favor of the tenants and it protects their rights a lot.

Some cities, including Berlin, have strict limits on the amount that a rent can be increased over a given period. There are guidelines in place which limit the rental increases to once a year and there’s an upper limit of of 20 percent over the course of 3 years.

A maximum of 20% over three years means about 7 percent a year, which is far from 25% on an annual basis.

This 1 bedroom flat might not cost as much as the examples above and at 620 pounds a month might seem like a bargain. Well as it seems, it’s not really such a bargain considering the building has been marked as unsafe and there’s a possibility of it collapsing. The tenants are unable to move as they simply do not have the money to do so and there’s no answer from the landlord whether they’ll do something (not that there’s a lot they could do)

There aren’t many things that would make you feel like you are part of the Walking Dead series. Well having no bed would definitely make you feel like you live in Alexandria in season 7 after all the beds were taken away from Rick’s group. The difference between the post-apocalyptic world of The Walking Dead and more specifically Alexandria and this girl’s apartment is that she’s actually paying to stay there. Six hundred pounds are definitely going to help the landlord out to buy a bed. After all a Kopardal bed from Ikea costs 99 pounds and a simple mattress for it would be another hundred.

This is probably the tenant’s problem. After all they are paying for a furnished flat, but bed’s aren’t something you find in everyone’s house, right ?

As it turns out, London isn’t the only place where tenants are being taken advantage of. There are landlords and real estate agents that would do anything to get a payday and move on to the next one.

Here are a few examples of people that are unhappy with their current tenancy situation from around the world, just so that we can compare the differences between the people there and the ones back here in London.

This girl from Calgary, Canada had to live 4 months with a shower which had caved in the wall. It took the landlord 4 months to get the problem fixed and as she had to shower during these 4 months, the way to do it was using a garbage bag to cover the hole. What a disaster!

Here’s something we decided to save for last. This is by far the worse case we got a hold of through the #ventYourRent campaign. These tenants’ house exploded with poo. As you can read the sump pump was tapped into a sewer line. That wasn’t the only problem though. There were cabinets which were falling apart (probably from old age and poor maintenance) and the master bedroom had ants. It kinda sounds like these people could have lived in an abandoned house and save themselves 1500$ in the process.

At the end this house got condemned, which seems like something far overdue.

We will continue updating this post about the worst landlords and the struggles of tenants around the world and especially London. Right now we can only address the Mayor of London and ask if there’s something planned to fix the uneven relationship between tenants and landlords.

In the meantime, the only thing we could help these tenants with is our affordable end of tenancy cleaning in London, which could help them save money when leaving their unpleasant landlords. Of course we can help out even if you don’t have a problematic relationship with the landlord. Our prices are just as great even if you and your landlord are best friends. Let’s be real though, most of the people living in London, don’t hold the best feelings for their landlords do they.

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